Backtrack: Virtual machine inside a virtual machine!

September 28, 2007

Someone asked me again today what would happen if you ran a virtual machine inside another virtual machine. I pointed them here, and decided it might be time to revisit this again. So here we go – Why? Because we can!

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Anyone familiar with virtualization technologies has wondered about it. There’s XEN, Qemu, VMWare, VirtualPC and VirtualServer, to name a few — but what happens when you run one inside the other? A Virtual Machine inside a Virtual Machine! I have Vista Business installed in a VMware virtual machine. Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 is the host OS — I decided to try to install VMware Server inside the Vista virtual machine… Well, the results aren’t exactly exciting. VMware’s error message:

Clearly, VMware in VMware isn’t going to work (at least not with a Windows guest). So, I’ll try a different approach. How about Slackware 11 under VMware, and then Damn Small Linux under QEMU within Slackware? This should be a treat… Or just unbearably slow.

Eureka! It works! It’s alive! And it’s almost usable. The only real problem is the mouse sensitivity — it’s very blocky and hard to control, but everything is there. Check out the screenshot of this machine within a machine within a machine, fully booted and at the desktop.

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